Poetry

While intersections between Greek literature and medicine have become a focal point of considerable research among Classicists in the last ten years, little work has been done in the field of Latin literature, with particular regard to poetry. And yet the human body and its affections have pride of place in numerous poems from ancient Rome, the medical in uence of which can hardly be denied.

By building on the recent developments in the field of medical humanities, this volume aims at tackling innovatively the intersections between medical sciences and Latin literary texts, with papers exploring the ways in which medicine is integrated into poetry and how poetry, in turn, can propagate medical knowledge across various social classes and cultural contexts.

This volume will uncover the connections between Roman literature and ancient theories of the body, thus showing how indebted Roman poetic production was to both ancient Greek and Roman medical traditions. As such, it will be of significant interest for researchers and postgraduate students working on ancient Greek and Roman medicine and philosophy, Roman poetry and literature more broadly, ancient senses and emotions, and medical humanities.

Over the last 30 years, many books, conferences and volumes have been devoted to the relationship between text and image in the Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. But there has been little space for poetic texts, which, in addition to the direct or mediated message, also demand the attention of the analyst through the impact of the intertext of the entire Latin poetic tradition, multiplying the levels of meaning and therefore the possibilities of interpretation. In relation to the recognition of the need to consider texts (mental or written) as sources of inspiration for images, we are now in a position to take a further step by applying to medieval culture the concept of iconotext developed by Liliane Louvel (2018) for modern literature. In this vein, the Versus ad picturas conference therefore aims to contribute to the study of the relationship between the images we now call artistic, painted on walls, fabrics, stained glass or parchments, and the verses that often accompany them materially or ideally, and which are now increasingly recognised as essential to their cultural understanding and social framing, in the hope of bringing us closer to the meaning hidden in their combination and the meaning perceived by the commissioners, executors and viewers of the time.

The speech technologies of the digital age make everything speak - from voice assistants and GPS navigators to streaming media. The dissociation of voice and speech from the speaker and the situation of speaking engendered by this condition imbues the ages-old question of lyric theory "Who speaks?" with renewed salience. This book investigates digital oral poetry - an artform that explores the modes of oral speech facilitated and conditioned by digital technologies and digital culture, foregrounding the selves that are performed and constructed in the speaking act. Practices of digital oral poetry run across the boundaries between institutionally recognised forms of art and poetry, pop culture and participatory culture online. They may include poetry performed in synthesised or deep-faked voices, AI-generated performance poetry, intersections of poetry and ASMR videos or audioliterary memes such as Autotune stories to name a few examples. Through a series of case studies, the book offers a (post-)phenomenological examination of the contemporary digitally-inflected forms of subjectivity as they manifest in digital oral poetry.

Recent news images of disastrous floods, fires and earthquakes vividly show we live in an unstable world. This book examines that precarity through an analysis of how disaster is expressed through poetry. It situates poetry of disaster as a distinct poetic endeavour and as an emerging field of academic research. Focusing on a selection of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry collections responding to notable disasters, these collections are explored firstly, as literary texts; secondly, as case studies into why and how the authors chose to write about these disasters in the way they did; and thirdly, as access points for wider investigations into disaster and disaster studies in the twentieth and twenty-first century. The texts also inform an exploration into the binary of man-made and natural , a binary that stubbornly persists in contemporary representations of disaster, however problematic that differentiation is in this age of the Anthropocene. 

This collection explores the teaching of poetry at university. Structured around three sub-sections, Poetic Close Reading, Poetic Periodicity and Poetic Toolkits, the contributors draw on a range of critical perspectives to engage with topics such as ecology, queerness, race and digitality, and use their expertise to establish links with sociology, creative writing and other disciplines in the academy. Chapters are aimed at a diverse body of learners, from workshop participants to taught postgraduates, and can serve as useful primers for lectures, modules, and educational training sessions in higher education. Situated at the cutting edge of the field, the book will invigorate pedagogical approaches to poetry and poetics for a new generation of teachers, students, and readers.

This open access volume addresses the vital role of the live event in British spoken word poetry of the past fifty years. It starts from the premise that meaning in poetry performance is radically conditioned by the performance s spatio-temporal situatedness and its specific forms of mediation: meaning emerges at the interface of text, voice action, body communication, the poet s projected stage identity, and is shaped by the unique and emergent dynamic between the poet-performer, audience, technology, and performance context. Through performance analyses that are informed by archival work and original interviews with practitioners, the book sheds new light on the dynamic and varied relationships between tradition, innovation, and mediation in British spoken word poetry. It attends to the performance work of canonical, emergent, and re-discovered figures from a range of stylistic, geographical, ethnic and socio-political constituents within the UK, exploring both avant-garde and popular forms of performed poetries.

By carefully relating individual performances to their specific event contexts, the volume sounds out the varied ways in which poets have creatively engaged with both literary and performance traditions as well as with media technologies. In the process, it addresses a number of key developments in UK poetry performance and underscores the transnational dimensions of British spoken word. In its entirety, the volume thus makes a pivotal contribution to the history of British poetry performance whilst also developing a critical lens through which to approach the poetry event.